Altitonant
by onewithroses
Summary: When Loki falls from the Bifrost he falls through a lightening storm in space. Or Frostiron meets the plot from The Lake House and Star Trek 2009
1. Chapter 1

**Fandom**: Iron Man, Thor, Avengers, Star Trek  
**Pairing**: Eventual? Implied? Frostiron (Loki/Tony) and maybe Kirk/Spock  
**Tags**: Alternate Universe(Thor/Iron Man/Avengers/Star Trek 2009/The Lake House)  
**Summary:**"Is it just me or is the thing Loki is falling into there look kind of like a "lightning storm in space"?"

The first message he receives is static, and Tony doesn't even realize it's a message at all until much later.

He's testing thrusters, spiraling up into the atmosphere when they fail-just for a moment-and he falls like a lead weight with a burst of static so loud he thinks his ears could bleed. "_Shit!_"

It only lasts six point two seconds, hardly enough time to yell, and then his hands fire up again and he evens out. His eyes roll across his screens, watching the suit's levels without any answer as to what just happened. "Jarvis, what the hell was that?"

"Scans indicate a incoming signal disrupted the thruster paths causing an electrical surge..."

The second message is gibberish. Or at least he thinks it is. Tony is in his workroom-not working, not really, but running through projects. He flicks through files with only half his attention and drops them into folders. This one is fun, that one is boring, another makes him wonder how many drinks he had when he thought of it. There's a glass of melting ice and brandy to his right and a pile of forgotten paperwork next to the garbage.

Then there's a pop, like the sound of wires sizzling or a radio turning on and then, "...that's the worst. Let's name him ..." It's a guy's voice. It's a bit hushed, choked-and very real.

And it comes from Dummy, the robotic arm that can't seem to stop spraying him with its built-in fire-extinguisher and shouldn't have a voice.

Tony swings around and eyes the machine. Dummy's fingers open and close under the scrutiny as the seconds tick by. Quiet. Quiet. Quiet.

"I hear you." The voice, this time, is female-high and cracking. Like a reaching gasp. It comes from the right of Dummy. He swings to catch which machine is offending this time-but there's nothing there. Lights blink on idling systems. An internal fan whirls quietly.

"I love you so much."

Behind him, the male voice again.

"I love you-"

The explosion is a defining silence. Tony doesn't know what the crack pop of all his systems at once meant until later. It's not until later that Tony hears a hiss and the machine he was using to display his work docket starts smoking. A fire alarm screams and he's covered with compressed carbon dioxide.

The Æsir have a word for black holes. They call them lófi, meaning the hollow of the hand. It's a hole in the universe that curls like water cupped between fingers. Everything swirls towards the middle until it fills up and spills over.

When Loki falls from the Bifrost like thread through a needle-hitting space and missing worlds. The roots of Yggdrasil comb through his skin and drag him through the stars. When he falls, he falls inward and he _surrenders_.

Space is cold and brittle against his skin and neither the roots nor branches of the Tree come to cradle him as he descends. The hotcold roots tear the air from his lungs leaving them burning. He chokes. Wonders momentarily dizzy with adrenalin of _struggle_ and the give-take of _loss_: _who am I now?_

The world moves in cycles. As he floats, spins, falls, he watches the universes and hours move together like gears-hooked and fashioned in steel. They click in the silence of the hot white stars and move together, overlapping. The past being the future and the future being the past.

Sometimes, Loki snags. The roots slow him, drag into his bones and leave him to hang. Then he thinks of history lessons and the Ginnungagap from before the world began. He hangs, delirious, in the dawning void between the icy Niflheim and burning Muspelheim. His bones stretch, his blood boils and freezes in turns, and he relinquishes himself to the yawning void between the worlds that no longer exists.

Sometimes, he clings to the edge of Ragnarok and the end of everything it brings with it. The beginning are one and the same and he knows:

Ragnarok has happened. Ragnarok will happen again. Ragnarok is happening now.

Ragnarok is always happening.

Loki lands bruised, his back crushed flat against metal flooring. He stares up at gleaming silver stairs and feels the vibration of a large body wading through space. It is metal and mechanics and ungraceful Midgard technology all grown up. He has no idea how he landed there or why, but soon enough there's a Midgardian woman at his side. She is plain. She is nothing. Loki cannot remember her face even as he stares at it but her warm hands burn cold against his skin. He can't hear her voice.

There are others there, too. They cluster around doorways, visit loved ones, bring supplies. Beings he's never seen before. How he went from space to inside a metal hull-Loki doesn't know and doesn't care.

For a week, he walks as a ghost. It's months later, or days. He has trouble pinpointing time passing when he believes himself to be dreaming of mortals transversing the sky. Ma're, the woman who brought him to the medical station and made him sit, stay, asserts he has head trauma. He should just wait. Take it easy. Wear this shirt. Eat this food.

Loki doesn't think it's head trauma.

He's always knew, of course, that science would eventually push humans beyond their moon-but the last he saw they seemed to be little further than banging together rocks and sticks and dirt. Loki has never dreamed that space he has never seen would be mortals' new frontier.

He has never dreamed of the beings they keep company with now-hundreds of years after his fall began. When he passes people he leaves little more than a shadow. He listens for two hearts standing next to the rigging, looks for the pale green skin and scales of another serving pasta, and smells sulfur in the gym.

It's a human's dream and reality. These fleeting vermin have excelled beyond reason. The metal rail in the engine room is cool under his fingers as he crosses the landing. The metal hums, mortals swarm here and there. He sees only base reason for it all. They remind him of ants-and he could reach out and crush them.

One at a time he could drag the air from their lungs, destroying his brother's little _pets_.

Instead he walks and realizes he's alone.

Weeks later, Loki is a number in a red uniform. He moves unchecked. He blends in and speaks to no one. Even in the loud of the mess hall he revels in (_hating_) the _absolute silence_. Human conversation is not the same, it holds no meaning, and so the silence tugs on him almost as much as the fall.

Here, in this strange place, there is no calling home. Thor is not waiting to grab him up, wielding Mjölnir and his ignorant forced-fondness for mortals. There is no one to see him succeed.

Or fail (because he has to fail because he is a _monster_. A monster. The thing hiding under children's beds. When he shuts his eyes too hard he can see blue skin and hears his brother's childish voice: _When I am king, I'll hunt the monsters down and slay them all!_)

His brother is not here. This is not his brother's Midgard. This is not his father's space.

He learns the latter too late. He learns it because there is no peace here.

Loki throws his voice home six months after he stops falling. It is a phone call dialed collect to a payphone-something imprecise and unreliable. The first time he successfully connects his brother's Midgard and his own nothing goes through. If anyone answers he doesn't hear it.

Loki is not, at first, sure who he has called at all-it is not a precise magic. It requires the right time and a lot of luck that interference doesn't jumble the signal or send the wrong voices. He uses an escape pod as his base and ties his magic to the com system. Loki believes the pod will never be used. They are safe. It is quiet, save for the hundreds of mortal voices.

He is there when the ship is rocked by explosions. He is there as he listens to the crew scream. He is there when a pregnant woman is wheeled in-gasping and arguing into the com system he has rigged.

A system which has just turned on-indicating another connection.

It is this way that Loki sends the wrong voices. As he stands next to an alien woman helping a midgardian give birth in a small escape ship his spell activates and sends their final conversation over the airways and through time to the ears of someone he does not know.

Loki chokes and bites his tongue to bleeding. He stills himself, an iron husk like the ship they are leaving to be torn to pieces.

Loki is Loki liesmith and Loki truthkeeper. These are his truths to keep.

When Loki arrives on Midgard, it is nothing like he remembers. He finds an apartment and dresses it as a home made of crisp metal lines with green accents. He speaks his way into jobs and watches spaceships be birthed from red dirt and mortal hands. He watches the widow from the spaceship make speeches, her perfectly coffered hair pinned and mouth full of sorrows that will only grow worse. He thinks: _you, too, are a liesmith, Winona_.

He has power here, but it is not absolute. Loki could crush them and he knows it-feels it in his bones that burn with resentment and lingering loathing.

But what does it matter, he has found, if you're a God who is _better than everyone_-if everyone is so much dust and no one is there to see you rise up? The lie is: _he is not lonely_. The reality is: there is no place to strive to be better than someone if that someone does not exist.

The third time he connects to the other Midgard, twenty years have passed in a blink of an eye. It's the way of things. Twenty years on one world, two weeks on another. Twenty years is no time at all-and forever.

And Loki wants to talk to someone.

When it connects to his monitor he tries talking. "I know you can hear me."

There is silence.

"If this is a-human you are not insane." The curl of his voice could be guised in kindness but it sounds more grasping than that. Loki is patient with plans and schemes but he has no scheme yet. "Answer me." Just a growing need-wide and wanting like the mouth of Fenrir. "You can hear me and you should be able to answer. So, answer me."

There is no picture. There is no tangible evidence except for the fact that Loki is sure-so very sure that he has connected, once more, to a world connected to the one he is staying on and that certainty is enough to raise up old wants in the form of a voice that feels as though its been torn from his throat. "_ANSWER ME._"

The voice that answers him is petulant, but clear, and Loki feels as though all his pent up _hopeangerfear_ has been released in a rush. "Alright. That's it. Who the hell is this?"


	2. Chapter 2

There are too many questions and not enough answers. The idea of a call through time and space is mind bendingly possible-but unlikely. He asks the voice on the other end to _prove it_, and so Loki breaks the years apart piece by piece-hissing out his frustrations.

"I joined a company that was obsolete. I revived it. Cultivated it. Brought it up from the bottom and made it a name across the galaxies." Which, yeah, sounds like something a God would do. Names are everything. If he were a God he'd want a name for himself no matter where he ended up. He'd want the pomp and bright lights.

Tony isn't one to disbelieve things on principle. His existence is something that should have been impossible. His suit should have been impossible. The voice that is speaking to him through the left speaker of his tv should have been impossible.

But Tony is not crazy. He is precise in his own way and as the call continues he draws up the security feed he heard about through the grapevine of tapped S.H.I.E.L.D computers. On it, there is a man the size of a small house and a hammer that seems to shoot lightning just before the image on the footage dissolves.

"Are you there, human?"

Tony listens like he rarely does and doesn't ask, doesn't want to know-not then: _That company-was it mine? That company-where is mine?_

Tony swallows, "Yeah, I'm here."

Because there is nothing worse to find that your legacy has died and everything in it.

* * *

The first time Kirk meets anyone outside of Riverside, Iowa, he's just driven a car off the quarry ridge. He's sitting in a waiting room-not a cell. Even if the sheriff shakes his head at Kirk and tells him there's a spot of the devil in him, he's still twelve. He has a juice box cupped in one scraped hand and when he isn't looking at it in pent up frustration, it shakes. He's too old for juice boxes, and this one is orange cranberry. He hates orange cranberry. He prefers the taste of dry soil turned muddy on his tongue. It keeps him grounded as he braces the ball of his right foot on the white tile to thrum out the tune of _I'm falling, I'm falling, the ground, the ground, the ground._

The man who walks into the room is not his mom (it never was anymore), or his brother, or his step dad. Jimmy looks from the stranger's crisp shiny black shoes to his black suit and can't help but think _Frank is_ sueing_me_. He swallows and squishes the round juicebox until three drops slip out of the straw at the top. Maybe he was old enough for juice boxes after all.

"Jim Kirk." The voice is as smooth as the man's suit jacket-so overdressed for Riverside, Iowa Jimmy thinks the small town charm might be mortally wounded-and Jim forces his chin up to look at him in his face and wishes he hadn't. "It's nice to meet you again."

Jim frowns, squints his eyes in a way that his mom always-used to -touch his chin for and tell him, _Eyes open, Jimmy, you have to have your eyes open to see everything before you_ miss it. "Do I know you?"

The man is dressed in blacks and greens and he's so pale he looks like he could have lived in a well. There's something oddly cold about him, too, that Jim can feel from four feet away. Cold and dark and wet-like the sucking feeling of clothes after falling through the ice on a cold winter's day. It's wet and unwell-and worse when he smiles. "We've met."

"Oh, like when I was a _baby_, right?" Everyone had met him as a baby-no one seemed to be interested in meeting him _now_.

"Oh, we have known each other for much longer than that."

Jimmy squints again, a frown following the assent of his eyes under his tousled blond hair. He decides the man might be a little off his rocker. Maybe he just looks like a lawyer-maybe he's supposed to be in the one room cell around the corner instead of the crisp white welcoming room. "Has anyone told you, you might need some sun?"

If possible, the man's smile widens into something truly unnerving. "Perhaps from time to time, yes." He leans on a cane he doesn't need and Jim hadn't noticed. "You can call me Loki. I served with your mother... and your father."

That doesn't impress him, shouldn't impress him. After all, running away from his father was what sent his mother away. Thinking about the crew and the stars is what sent his mother away. It sent Sam away, too, but later. Or, no, Frank made Sam run away-but it might as well been his mom. Always absent, always off world, always looking out for number one (except, his traitorous mind reminds him, when she stayed up with him all night showing him the constellations, when she came in like demon on horseback when he got sick at school, except when she purposefully his birthday that was never much fun anyway- but made it up by kidnapping him from math class two days later and kept him out of school for a whole _three days_).

"Where's Frank?" The question isn't the one he wants to ask, or even one he ever thought he would-but Frank was in charge so Frank should be here. Or his mom should be on the vid phone yelling at him. It's been long enough-they could have gotten her.

"Indisposed. You seem to have made an impression on the chief of police."

Jim scuffs the front of his shoe against the tile and snuffs with false pride, "Not that hard."

"Yes, well." The man looks at him like there's something hovering over his shoulder and it makes him uncomfortable even if it's not quite threatening. "While your step-father sorts his paperwork, you've been given an opportunity."

"An opportunity?" He's dubious. This sounds like work. Jim remembers a high school kid picking litter off the side of the road for six months after he shoplifted. Shoplifting is nothing like throwing his dad's antique over a cliff. He'll have to clean up road trash for _forever_.

"I work for _Stark Enterprises_, and I want to invite you to the teens and preteens science summer program." The grin is less wide now-almost thoughtful. "Unless, of course, you'd like to spend your summer here doing menial services."

* * *

"His mother believed everything she said," Loki confides-voice crackling through the improbable soundwaves. "It's what made getting her to agree to summer camp instead of juvenile detention so terribly easy."

Tony, who isn't sure he ever wants to imagine the man he's talking to with children asks, "Why did you rescue him?"

There is a pause so long Tony wonders if the line has dropped out of existence once more. "I didn't."

Tony let's out a huff-Loki knows exactly what he's talking about, "Why did you invite him, then?"

Another pause, shorter than the last but hanging, "He reminded me of Thor."

* * *

It has been four days, ten hours, thirty-two minutes, and five seconds since Spock found out his father considered his mother to be a logical choice. He's fifteen, old enough not to be bothered by sentiment, but he still finds it difficult to reconcile within his own constructs of his family.

Although never one to romanticize his beginnings, he finds fault with the idea that he had embellished his parents' relationship. Observations to the contrary appeared to be fruitful, even in the passing few days after the fight. His mother often brushes her fingers just around the wrist of his father's somber colored Tlor Thakal. It is not quite scandalous, but Spock feels certain that this is an indication of her favor to his father beyond rational choice. For his father-he notices the way his hand sometimes goes to the small of her back, the brief not-smile that is more of a feeling than a reality and only comes up when she's talking, and the way they bow their heads together in hushed whispered words.

"Spock." His mother stops two feet away-assent to his request that she allow him to maintain autonomy. He is not a child anymore and does not need to be coddled, even if he wants it sometimes still. "Why don't you walk with me. Your father and I have been talking."

They have long been talking since he came home with a fat lip. His mother had not been able to keep from smothering him with cool arms and soothing words he did not need...but endured (enjoyed). Spock nods his agreement and stands, putting down his pad to walk unhindered. "What is it you have been discussing, mother?"

"We believe it would do you good to leave Vulcan for a month." For a moment Spock looks stricken-there is a moment in time where his arms and legs lock up, his lungs seize, and he thinks rationally _You're sending me_ away_?_

And in that moment his mother is upon him-gentle hands on his face and quick, softly spoken words. She has always, and will always, know him best. "No!" Her voice is insistent and fast, pummeling his initial response with a powerful burst of words. The words are so quietly spoken nothing in the hall stairs. There are no echoes. "No, Spock. I will go with you. Your father will go with you." And the moment subsides until they are both shoulder to shoulder again-or shoulder to hip as it is now. "But we will visit Earth. There is a remarkable new summer program for young people and we think you might like to attend."

This sounds an awful lot like a ploy. His parents have been scheming against him, likely thinking it is for his betterment. "And what will you do, mother?"

He glances up at her, straight faced concern. He is met with only delight and imagines that she wishes to press him into her shoulder again.

"Oh, Spock, I will teach."

* * *

Winona is beautiful but not in the way most think of her. When Loki steps up next to her on the viewing deck dressed in crisp black clothes next to her engine grease and reds he does so with enough distance to keep the mess from leaping between them.

"Jim is well." It does not elude either of them that he was able to come to her ship before she reached home. She hasn't even tried but he can see the muscles working under her face saying, _I would have been late anyway. This is for the best. I tried. I tried. I tried._

"I'm glad. I was worried." This is not a lie and Loki nods his ascent with a carefully stifled smile.

"I know, but he will have the best care this summer." It is almost a barb at the lack of care she has invested in the past five years and she blinks away, looking towards the stars. "The best teachers. It's a shame that-"

"No." Winona Kirk's - because she will never give up her first husband's name; it's hers and she guards it jealously - eyes turn back to him, firm and tugging unhappily on her bottom lip. "This is only for the summer. After this summer..." There is a hitch, a pause. "My rotation will be complete, and I'll go back."

Back. Not home. So Loki nods again. Winona tells the best lies to herself-and they both know it.

* * *

The first person Spock meets - besides the man with slicked back hair and a tight, pressed suit - is a young boy about his age. He thinks he could be a little younger from the way he sticks his tongue out from the corner of his lips as he uses a glitter infused crayon to solve what appears to be a partially completed differential equation, but human ages are difficult to assess. There aren't that many kids there at all-or teens and preteens-but it's still early yet. He sits down and is poised to pick up his pad when the blond boy suddenly drops the crayon and snatches up Spock's hand. "I'm Jim, by the way." Then he parrots something that sounds like the old movies his mother sometimes watched about gruff men on earth. Jim is too young to pull it off. "What are you in for, kid?"

Spock is so startled by the hand on his that he fumbles, bursting out in perfect Vulcan poise: "A kid is the prodigy of a goat." He pulls his hand but it doesn't move, it is uncomfortably warm against the human's-Jims-and he can feel the throw thrum of nervous excitement where their skin meets. He can feel places where the skin pulls tight in healing. "We appear to be youths of approximately the same age."

The words don't detour Jim, if anything he seems more amused, "You always talk like that?"

Spock retrieves his hand and Jim picks up another crayon. Pink, this time, with blue glitter. "Yes."

"Cool." Jim twisted the crayon between his fingers. "You have a name?"

"My name is Spock."

"Okay, Spock." Jim rolls another crayon over to him-yellow with black glitter pitted inside. "I saw you looking at my math. Do one with me."

It's difficult to say no; so, Spock doesn't.

"You know," Jim says after a long moment and a string of numbers each done in different colors. "After dinner, they don't watch the cameras much."

The grin Jim gives is reckless, almost infections, and Spock can't help the way his eyebrows rise just slightly.

"You in?" Spock can think of a thousand logical reasons to say now-and a thousand logical reasons to say yes.

Jim continues the conversation and Spock works on the equation, trying not to stare at his unexpected companion. It's in looking, though, that he is sure that Jim is more than wildness wrapped in bravado. He sees him clench his teeth in a parody of aggression and draws his hands out wider and more energetically as their one sided conversation continues.

"What are you in for?" Jim repeats at last and stuffs a crayon behind his ear as though that will aid him in looking more than a lost kid in a shiny white compound with a dozen crayons. "_I_ drove a car off a cliff."

That night Spock leaves his dorm room three seconds before Jim knocks.


End file.
